I met one of the group's founders, Raull Santiago, while he was in New York for a Witness panel and the international launch of Cufa. Later, he told me more about the group and its future.

Why was Papo Reto created?

Papo Reto happened naturally and became a collective around March 2014. At the end of 2013, there were really strong rains in Rio de Janeiro. Here in Complexo do Alemão, many homes were destroyed. People in the favela involved in social issues worked together and managed to help families with everything they needed after the disaster. After that, people went back to work. Me and so many others were concerned about social issues and trying to help out in some way. So we saw the potential of working together as a team to help people who lost their homes. Some people continued working together and we became the Papo Reto collective. Papo Reto was born from the idea of the strength we had working together.

What's the role of Whatsapp in the work you do?

The role of "zapzap" and so many other tools and social networks are essential, since it's through them that we communicate in real time, and often in strategic ways about everything happening in the favela. Our Whatsapp groups are popular resistance groups, guerrilla communication, collective protection.

What do you consider Papo Reto's greatest achievement?

We're not seeking achievements, but rather collective advances. We're less than two years old, but through our work we've already put Complexo do Alemão on the map in a real way. We've done this showing the violation of rights as well as showing what's positive in the favela. Our importance is being able to bring the name of Complexo do Alemão to the world and have an impact to be able to transform our reality in a positive way. Achievement means having more and more people learning about us through multimedia, and multiplying this knowledge and potential.

Policeman filming an Alemão protest.

The group has received threats due to your work. What kind of daily risks do you face?

The majority of people in Papo Reto received at least five threats, all of them, unfortunately, from public security agents; in other words, the police. The biggest risks are having false evidence used against us, or being kidnapped by the police, or being shot and killed based on the simple fact that we exposed the violent and wrong ways that public (in)security forces use in the favela.

What are your plans for the group's future?

Continue working with communication. But we don't have a base or headquarters, even a small one, to hold meetings, store equipment, or hold workshops that require certain material, so that's a goal. Our big plan is to multiply the methodologies and techniques we've been learning to show the reality of young people who live in conflict zones, prejudice, racism, and other abuses.

May 10, 2015

Humans of New York has become a global phenomenon, with more than 12 million fans on Facebook, multiple book deals, and a partnership with the UN. Street photographer Brandon Stanton, the project's creator, inspired "Humans" pages around the world, from Paris to Tehran to Bangalore.

In Brazil, there are four major Humans spin-offs in Rio, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Recife, with several other smaller pages in those cities. I was curious to find out who's behind the Brazilian Humans projects, so I exchanged emails with the creators and team members of these pages.

I am 19 years old and I study journalism and performing arts. I am also a part-time English teacher and photographer, but I work as a freelancer.

I run the page with a friend named Bruna Fernandes, 18. She first created the page in mid-June last year and I joined a few months later. We met on the Internet and the page wasn't that popular back then, but we started to gain a lot of supporters all around the world and the media got interested which was very helpful to spread the word.

"'If you could give an advice for a large group of people, what would it be?' 'Do not stand still on the left side of the escalator.'"

Personally I have always been a very curious and caring person. I would always naturally talk to strangers anywhere I'd go. I remember being a kid sitting in the passenger seat next to my mom and watching all the people walking on the streets and riding the bus and just going on with their lives and I'd get so frustrated because I wanted to know where every single one of them was coming from, where they were going and how they were feeling. My friends thought I was weird because I would ask personal questions to the lunch lady or the doorman. So that need to know a little bit more was always there in me.

Then I discovered Humans of New York in 2011 and I became a huge fan. I wanted to create a similar page but I never had the courage. And then I met Bruna through Facebook and we met in person for the first time at a park where I took pictures of strangers with incredibly interesting lives. And that's how it went.

I have a few favorite stories but the one I will never forget is about a lady that has one of the warmest hearts I've ever known. And she was the one that first engaged a conversation with me.

"Everything was set for us to get married. We had been dating for 5 years, and the ceremony was going to happen in September. In June, he told me there was only a month left of his marriage with another woman. I only got out of this one having a lot of faith in God. I suffered a lot, spent years not dating anyone until I met my daughter's father. I lived with him for 10 years, until I got pregnant. She was born 'special.' Her father left me."Read the rest of the story here.

There's three of us on the team: Caio Queiroz, 20, a photographer and art director at HDRec; Carina Pereira, 19, a unversity student and creative director; and me, Carolina Magalhães, 19. I work in radio and TV production.

Caio deals most with the photography part, but the work of finding stories and transcribing them and updating the fanpage and keeping it active is a collective effort. We also have an Instagram.

Everyone who gets involved with the "Humans of" brand is a fan of the HONY phenomenon and it was the same for us. We were at my house, and Carina had shown me the original version of what would become our future project. We thought, "We could make a Recife version."

"When I was little and my mom died giving birth to my brother, we went to live with my dad. In this old house there was a door stop; one day my father came and told me to lie down with my head there; he wanted to kill me by hitting my head. But my sister came just in time and didn't let him. Nobody believes in me."

Plus, people in Recife love to talk, you know? (Even tourists who come here notice this, and it's really true.) For example, I'm at the bus stop with another woman and by the time the bus gets there, I already know the woman has three kids, is late to get an x-ray, has stuff to do at home and is so excited to see her granddaughter next weekend. People from Recife have this thing of loving to talk, to be friendly and involved.

The goal of Humanos de Recife - along with finding and showing stories - is exactly to try to remind people of this, to make sure they know more about their own city while seeing the city in a different way. Another thing that we wanted is to make it 100% ours, so when we chose the name, we decided to leave it in Portuguese and make it closest to how we talk.

I think the coolest thing we found was a guy who discovered at age 18 that he was adopted - in the most unique way possible.

"I was in the army barracks when I saw a person who looked a lot like me. Curious, I went to speak to him and he looked like a copy of me. When I went home, I told me mom I'd seen someone identical to me, and she turned to me and said: 'It's your brother.'" Read the rest of the story here.

*****

Humans of Rio de JaneiroSee the page on FacebookFollowers: 44,000Languages: English and PortugueseCreator: Eiran Kreimer

I'm 43 and I work in real estate which doesn't have anything to do with photography. There are two other people who run the page: Dominique Valansi, a journalist who specializes in photography and Fabio Minduim, a professional photographer.

When the New York page had a little over 30,000 followers, I decided to create a Carioca version in May 2012. Though it's based on the New York page, it tries to do something different with its own personality. Rio has unique local characters which should be seen in a different way than they're usually shown.

"Where is the cable car that used to pass by here?"

We've already published more than 1,500 photos and 80 videos. Sometimes a photo is marvelous and beautiful, and other photos are simpler and have a story with an impact. Some people who live outside the country prefer certain photos, while people who live here identify with other photos.

"They call me 'Di Chicken.' I live close to Central Station, and I pay R$650 in rent. In 2008, I ended up in a shelter, and since I never wanted to do anything wrong, they gave me that nickname. I'm a little late, I'm supposed to go gather cans with someone. That's my job, but I can walk with my head held high."

I'm 28 and a photographer. I studied web design and worked with electronics distribution until I decided to bet on, dedicate myself to, and deepen my knowledge of photography.

"Sir, will you take my picture too?"

As an amateur photographer, I went to downtown Curitiba and took a photo of a homeless man. I showed him the picture and he invited me to sit down and talk. He told me the story of how he ended up on the streets. This was my first contact with this type of photography. The same day, a friend showed me Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York project and I fell in love with the idea. So the next morning, Humans of Curitiba was born.

"I always enjoy biking. But what I really like is biking in this cool weather."

I decided to create something in my city when I saw that good messages could come out of stories of "strangers" and a different way of looking at how people see those around them, the people who share their space and society.

April 24, 2015

If you follow Brazil and you're on Twitter, you likely know Sérgio Charlab, a Brazilian journalist who does an incredible job of aggregating news about Brazil in English. He's incredibly agile at sharing and condensing both breaking news headlines and the best enterprise stories.

Now, he's testing out a new distribution service on Whatsapp - the first Brazilian broadcast news service on the chat app. He sends top stories throughout the day, as well as the front pages of the major Brazilian newspapers each morning. Each headline comes with an image and authors' Twitter handles, making it easy to reshare on Twitter.

Charlab is a veteran Brazilian digital journalist. Three decades ago, he used HTML, a novelty back then, to get Jornal do Brasil online, making it the first Brazilian newspaper on the web. During that time, Online Journalism Review named him as one of the "50 International Names to Know" in digital news. He's had a long career in newspapers and magazines, as well as publishing two books. He's always liked to combine his passion for journalism and technology.

Via email, I asked Charlab about his work on Twitter and Whatsapp to understand his strategy.

How long have you been doing the @scharlab Twitter, and why did you start it?

I started sharing Brazil related news regularly in 2012. It was the visible part of my attempt to understand and partially automate all human judgements related to finding, reading, evaluating and sharing news.

Why did you decide to start the Whatsapp service?

Since the 1990s, (now defunct) Pointcast there have been countless services with the ambition to define "The Future of Online Publishing." Twitter may have been the one that came closest to the way this elusive future is shaped in my mind. Unfortunately, that still unreachable goal alone can't sustain Twitter investors' eagerness to get value for their money in this competitive field.

As Twitter expands its focus of attention, it loses part of that journalistic appeal and dilutes its heft as a tool to share news. At the same time, 'one to one' services like Snapchat or Facebook's WhatsApp not only now grow faster than Twitter, but also have been adding "one to many" tools. That allows one person/organization to directly distribute content to many. I was waiting for this effervescent moment, and as soon as WhatsApp also launched a web version I knew it was time to start playing more seriously with it.

Courtesy of Sérgio Charlab.

How do you divide your time between WhatsApp and Twitter? How do you decide what goes on which platform?

To feed Twitter, I've developed a plethora of tools/ways to find news content to aggregate. Those who follow the Twitter handle know that, if I wish, hardly a piece of content or tidbit data on Brazil escapes me. What many don't know, is that I also developed a capacity to gather this content very quickly after it gets published online originally.

I read or parse all data, instead of just resharing as is very common online. Once I get content suitable to aggregate, I schedule it for the next appropriate time spot on Twitter—but share it immediately for the WhatsApp subscribers. They get it first and can even reshare themselves from WhatsApp to Twitter, even before the time I do it myself.

I have plenty of data from almost 50,000 tweets sharing news to understand how Twitter works best for most news consumer users. It may be surprisingly counterintuitive. I'm now doing the same with WhatsApp. I start with preconceptions which I expect to test, adapting the daily feed to the discoveries made by usage. For instance, at least for now, WhatsApp users instantly get the most "powerful" news, tidbits. These will be in much lower numbers than a regular day of posts on Twitter. Of course, WhatsApp users can always block the broadcast or silence the notifications for a while. The free WhatsApp subscription is harmless.

Do you think messenger services like Whatsapp will ultimately be more useful than Twitter for news delivery? Why or why not?

There's a shining moment for everything. Email is obviously suitable for the same "one to many" news distribution I'm doing through WhatsApp. But it has long lost its mojo. Twitter's mojo is entirely based on its enviable base of news sources and celebrities. But you already see Twitter somewhat desperately trying to keep both groups at bay—a difficult task in the exciting new apps/services launching times in which we live.

Through WhatsApp (or also Facebook’s Messenger or any new similar service) you are directly in touch with your subscribers, who of course have enough confidence in what you do to allow you to reach them in their personal mobile space. This is no small matter. Because of that, I'm very committed to maintaining the privacy of personal information of the WhatsApp readership.

Subscribers are protected by anonymity in regard to other subscribers. Only I know they're receiving the news broadcast. And differently than a WhatsApp group, in the WhatsApp broadcast if you reply to any post it won't be addressed to the group of subscribers—only to me. This kind of exchange can quickly evolve to a deeper level of personalization that would allow both service producer and subscriber to control the flow to the news consumer’s individual needs.

Ultimately, I want to give news lovers the flow of information I had dreamt for myself. Curated by great editorial minds that go through everything in detail to find and share, directly to me, what I need and what I would love to know, in the timing and frequency I appreciate best and in a format I can easily and quickly share with others.

Follow Charlab on Twitter at @scharlab and get on his Whatsapp list by emailing scharlab at gmail dot com.

December 16, 2014

Over the past few months, I've witnessed thousands of fellow New Yorkers hit the streets to protest in favor of civil rights, and through social media I've seen friends around the country speak out against racial injustice. The cases of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice have brought issues to the fore that have galvanized young people all over the United States. These three cases have come to represent the many young black men who die violently each year. In the United States, young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than their white counterparts, and the overall homicide rate for black male teenagers is more than 20 times higher than that of white male teens.

It's a similar story in Brazil, but one that people don't often talk about. In Brazil, 30,000 people ages 15 to 29 are murdered each year, or around 82 young people killed every day. Of those victims, 77 percent are black. On average, police kill more than five people daily. And overall, only 5 to 8 percent of homicides go to trial.

In spite of these overwhelming numbers, Brazil hasn't had a big case to widely stir people to action--yet.

With this in mind, I asked Alexandre Ciconello, a human rights adviser at Amnesty International Brazil, about his organization's mission to raise awareness about this issue and how Brazil's struggle with black deaths parallels the same problem in United States. Ciconello monitors issues of public security, violence, and the judicial system.

Black Youth Alive is an Amnesty International campaign that seeks to put an end to the high number of homicides and of black youth in particular. Through communication, social media, and activism, we hope to put a stop to people's indifference in relation to the high rates of youth homicides, especially black youth in Brazil, so people mobilize and speak out in favor of youth staying alive.

This initiative is relevant given the rise in murders in Brazil. Plus, there's been a trend in recent years in which the number of homicides among the black population has risen, while the murder rate fell among the white population. The main group of victims are black youth, many of them residents of favelas or city outskirts. The majority of victims' profiles (male, young, black), compounded with racism, contribute to the fact that society doesn't mobilize to address this problem and to demand an end to these deaths.

The campaign includes publicizing a number of statistics. Which fact surprised you the most?

The fact that surprised me the most was that Brazil more homicides than any country in the world. There were 56,000 murders in 2012. Of those, 30,000 victims were youth, and 77 percent of youth victims were black. Never has there been so much murder in Brazil, and it's shocking to see the selectivity of victims' profiles.

In the United States, there are protests going on about black youth killed by police. Do you see similarities between the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the United States and Amnesty's campaign?

Michael Brown's murder in August took place in a poor, black suburb. The same thing happens every day in Brazil. Black youth are the most affected by violence and we know that a part of these murders are the result of police action. Both in the United States and Brazil, there's a legacy of social exclusion and discrimination associated with black youth, which should be widely discussed and repudiated. The difference is that in the United States, the death of this young man by police stirred people and caused outrage, while in Brazil these stories rarely reach the back pages of newspapers and society deals with this as if violent death was the inevitable fate of these young people.

In Brazil, there have been local protests against people killed by police (like Amarildo, for example). In Brazil, could national protests take place as a result of a case like this?

That's our hope, but before that we need to break this pact of silence that exists in relation to these deaths, with rare exceptions. Society's indifference toward so many lives lost is one of our greatest disgraces. All of these deaths represent a tragedy and an irreversible loss. Society has a strategic role to ensure that this reality changes.

November 16, 2014

Do Rio's favela residents feel pacification has improved their lives, or worsened them? New York-based photographer Margaret Day decided to see what people thought in one community three years after pacification began.

Day witnessed the pacification of Brazil's largest favela firsthand, when she was living in the community in 2011 doing social work and photography. She's been traveling frequently to Rio since then, spending weeks or months at a time living in Rocinha, and has watched the community change in the process. "Whenever I speak with people from the asfalto, or abroad, they are always amazed that I love living here, because usually their only frame of reference of favelas is the popular media," Day told me. "One of the first things they ask me is if life in Rocinha is better before or after pacification. As anyone who lives here knows, that answer is not so simple. There is a tendency among people to want to argue with me when I point out any positives about living here before the pacification, because I'm a gringa. These same people never come to Rocinha and/or never talk to the residents."

Rocinha, when pacification began in 2011, by Margaret Day

So on the aniversary of Rocinha's pacification, Day decided to talk to residents and see what they had to say. "The initial reaction almost everyone I spoke to about participating in the photo essay was fear of varying levels," Day explained. "Asking people to go on record is highly unusual because the culture here is not to discuss these things publicly. Asking someone whether they prefer life before or after pacification is a very personal question and it is generally something people tend to only discuss that with people they know. However, people here are always talking about it."

Not everyone Day spoke to agreed to participate, and some people even thought she was crazy, she said. Many people she spoke to said that in some ways, not much has changed since "the guns are just in different hands." Day hopes the project will create more dialogue on integrating favelas into the city so that all stakeholders--especially residents--are heard.

Day has showcased the photo essay, called "The Residents Speak - Os Moradores Fala," on Facebook, and the interesting thing to see is just how much the answers vary. Some say that violence was worse before, and others say it was worse after pacification. There's also some that say specific crimes, like rape and robbery, have increased after pacification; this same issue has been reported in other pacified favelas, too.

See a selection of Day's photos from the project, with residents saying whether they preferred life in Rocinha before or after pacification. To see the full photo essay, visit Day's Facebook page.

"Before: The thieves had more respect. They were afraid to steal, the rapist to rape. There weren't gunshots everyday but today we have no peace at any time." (Age 33)

"After: even with lots of shootouts and violence, there's a trust that the military police gives to the community." (Age 21)

"Before: because the 'community' respected the residents." (Age 33)

"After: because we are not seen as only being poor anymore. They look at us through different eyes." Age 25

"Before: with guys [police] like this, who needs the criminals?" Age 26

July 30, 2014

Mauricio Santoro is a man of many hats. He's a political scientist by trade, and is working as an advisor at Amnesty International in Rio. He's also a university professor and a columnist, and is active on social media. And in this age of the proliferation of experts, he's someone who really knows what he's talking about, making him a great asset for journalists.

I've known Mauricio for years through social media, and in April I had the chance to finally meet him in person and chat about his work. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Working at Amnesty International

In Brazil, there are several human rights crises a week, says Santoro. "The Amnesty office was created in part to work on Brazilian issues, but also to bring Amnesty's global issues to a Brazilian audience," he explained. "For example, we did a campaign on homophobia in Russia, which went really well because people identified with it. It's the same thing whenever we talk about the United States, because Brazilians love to criticize the U.S.," he laughs. "The Middle East is hard; it's very complicated and tends to divide our base." Santoro focuses on four main areas: foreign policy and human rights, education and human rights, indigenous peoples, and issues related to the dictatorship. But he notes that things can come up unexpectedly with such frequent crises.

What's the Most Important Human Rights Issue in Brazil?

"If I had to choose one, it'd be homicides," says Santoro, "because Brazil is the country that has the largest number of murders in the world."

"Proportionally, it's not the most violent country, though it is in the top 10. It's the most violent in terms of absolute numbers of homicides. Brazil alone has more murders each year than the United States an the European Union combined. More than China, more than India, and these are countries with much bigger populations than Brazil. We're talking about something around 50,000 homicides a year. There are countries at war that don't reach that annual number."

Murder, perhaps, is the most serious violation of human rights, says Santoro, "because there's no turning back." The most you can do is to try to compensate by ensuring justice for the family and to provide support to those close to the victim, he adds. "With 50,000 murders a year, that means around 130 murders a day. It's such a big number that it ends up creating a feeling of insensitivity and apathy."

There are two ways Amnesty is dealing with the issue. "The first is what we call the 'symbolic deaths' in order to mobilize people. Nobody goes out to protest because of a statistic. People protest because they found out about the story of a life. The story of Amarildo last year was the most important case of human rights in Brazil because it was an individual story that illuminated this greater trend of human rights violations, and it brought together the issues of death, disappearance, torture, and the pacification debate."

But there's a challenge to this approach. "The classic homicide victim in Brazil is a young, black man, who lives in a favela or a neighborhood on the city's outskirts. Our director says there's an epidemic of indifference in Brazil with relation to the death of these young people. It's rare to find a case like that of Douglas (a dancer who was killed in Rio in April), that one of these murdered people has a first name, a last name, a face."

The second way is a new study. It aims to compile information about the murders of young black men in Brazil, because "the data on this is still shaky," Santoro explains. "We don't have official documentation about how they died, whether in a shoot-out with organized crime or in a fight with a neighbor, or if they were killed by police. So this research is to fill the gap. We're also going to launch a sensitization campaign to convince people that these young people had a life story, they had dreams."

Santoro gives an example of last year's fire in a club in Santa Maria, in Rio Grande do Sul. "It was very interesting the way that tragedy was covered in the media and played out in public opinion. I remember seeing several newspaper and magazine covers showing the faces of the people who died. And there were several of their stories. 'This girl wanted to be a doctor. This guy was trying to join the Air Force.' It wasn't just a statistic: 200 or so people died there. There was a life story. And that's the correct way to deal with this type of tragedy. The problem is that we're talking about an audience that's largely middle class, and the people who are dying in Brazil are largely young and poor."

There's a flipside to the coverage of the Rio Grande do Sul tragedy. Santoro gives the example of Salvador, the city that has the largest number of homicides in Brazil. "The New York Times did a very good special on Salvador, talking about violence and urban decay. I never saw that in a big Brazilian publication," observed Santoro. "It's partially because the Brazilian media does a lot of coverage of Rio, São Paulo, and Brasília, and does little about the North and Northeast. During one of Salvador's police strikes, over 80 people died in the metropolitan area. I don't know the names of these people. And it's possible that more people died in Salvador in those three days than in Syria during its civil war. The media didn't talk about these people's stories."

Public Transportation as a Human Right

Because transportation affects the right to come and go and the right to the city, it's considered a human right, Santoro says.

"Last year, an official from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visited and met with mothers who had lost children to violence in Rio. She asked them what they considered a priority human right, and which rights they thought were being violated. And their answer surprised me. They said it was the 'right to time.' And they explained that they have to work and care for their families, but waste a lot of time in traffic during their commute. They felt bad for leaving their children with others who may not have been the best influence."

Transportation affects many in Rio, Santoro explains, and it impacts citizens' participation in their communities. "You imagine someone, for example, who lives in Rio's West Zone, which is now the most populous area of the city, where it easily takes three hours to get to and from work in very poor conditions. Buses, trains, overcrowded and dangerous vans. These things accumulate and make Cariocas' day-to-day very hard and there's a loss in quality of life. It affects families and community life. Someone who spends three or four hours a day on public transportation every day won't want to participate in a community board meeting, or would want to sit and debate what's happening in their neighborhood. It's also very common for transportation to not only be very bad, but very expensive, so that people don't circulate much in the city of Rio and instead stay confined close to their neighborhoods. In a city like Rio that's unequal in terms of access to culture, this means that generally these people won't be able to get to see much of the city's cultural side, which is largely concentrated in downtown and the South Zone."

There's also the issue of prejudice. Back in April, an actress was photographed on a public bus. "It was absolutely a normal thing, but it became a scandal," Santoro notes. But because the middle class uses public transportation, there's more pressure to improve the quality of service, he adds.

This differs from the issue of sanitation, for example. "For the government, sanitation is an investment that has low electoral returns, and it takes a long time to build sanitation infrastructure. So it's probable that a government that starts one of these projects won't finish in a single term, and the person that finishes the projects is the one who will get the visibility of victory, likely the original person's successor. So this acts as a strong mechanism to not incentivize this type of activism. It's different from, say, constructing a school and putting up a plaque."

Favela Protests: A New Phenomenon?

I asked whether favela protests represent a change, and he said yes--with a caveat.

"The novelty is not that there's protests in the favelas. This is something that dates back to the 1970s, if not before. What I think is new about these favela movements is that in general it's something very local in each community, and now they're managing to create alliances with middle class movements and other activist groups. So for example, during last year's protests, there were protesters who left en masse from Rocinha and Vidigal and crossed Leblon, Rio's upper-middle class neighborhood, and went to demonstrate in front of the governor's house. That, I'd never seen before. Maybe it happened at some point, but I'd never seen anything like it. Also, it was interesting because they knew they had to take certain precautions, different ones from that of the middle class activists. None of them had their faces covered, no masks or bandannas. Because the kids who come down from Vidigal or Rocinha to protest know they have to be very, very careful not to give any excuse to the police to intervene."

The World Cup's Human Rights Legacy

I spoke to Santoro a few months before the games started, and he said that ahead of the games, the Cup had had very negative consequences. "There were a certain number of favela removals associated with the World Cup, and perhaps the most symbolic one was the Metro Favela close to Maracanã where a good portion of homes were removed to build a parking lot. This is very powerful symbolically, removing people from a favela right in front of the stadium."

Another question is the future of the stadiums. "In places like Brasília and Manaus, who is going to use them? Is there really no better destination for those funds? I don't mean to say that the money used for the World Cup could solve Brazil's social problems. Not even close. These investments represent a small fraction of the Brazilian federal government's budget. But it's clear that when people have access to poor-quality public schools, public health, and public transport, these stadiums stand in contrast, and it's like rubbing salt in the wound."

Santoro added that it's possible many Brazilians won't use these stadiums. "Because what's happening in Brazil is also happening in Europe: the gentrification of football. It's becoming very expensive to attend games. Where there used to be standing-room only, there are now seats. And this is happening in a very unequal country like Brazil, where a football stadium is one of the few public spaces that were in fact frequented by all social classes. It was a place where the poor could go together with the middle class and the elite to watch a game and cheer for the same team. So this has a negative social, psychological effect, and I don't think we understand its totality yet in Brazil. Last year, I noticed that during the Confederations Cup, the spectators you saw in the stadiums were mostly white, in a country where the majority of the population is black or mixed race." (Sidenote: this turned out to be the case during the World Cup, too.)

Gentrification: In Rio and Beyond

With a rise in the cost of living, it's not just stadiums that are becoming gentrified. "It's happening in various Brazilian cities, but it's especially acute in Rio due to geographic and policies. Rio is a city that historically has been squeezed between the ocean and the mountains. There's not a lot of space, and Rio apartments are generally small in comparison to other cities. In the 1940s and 50s, the city began to grow west, with neighborhoods like Barra da Tijuca, Bangu, Realengo, Vargem Grande, the same parts of the city that are growing today and the only place left for the city to grow. And because of limited heights for buildings, you're not going to see a South Zone with highrises like in São Paulo."

As a result of limited space, Rio has become an expensive place to live, Santoro says. "There's also things like the mega-events and the pre-salt discovery. And then there's the public security policy to construct pacification units in favelas. This resulted in security improvements in several middle-class neighborhoods that used to have problems like stray bullets and shoot-outs. This raised prices, too, in the neighborhoods and in the favelas themselves. Vidigal is one of the best examples; it's becoming a bohemian neighborhood, with lots of artists and foreigners moving there."

April 08, 2014

Ingrid Silva was eight years old when she started doing ballet. Like other little girls, she started out going to classes with a sibling—in her case, her brother—and worked her way up to professional training and eventually, achieved an accomplishment many only dream of: getting into a company.

But Ingrid isn't your typical ballerina.

The daughter of a domestic worker and a retired Air Force employee, she grew up in Rio de Janeiro''s Benfica neighborhood, a working-class area not far from the city's famed Maracanã Stadium. At around age 13, she started getting serious about ballet, quitting swimming and other sports to dedicate herself to dance.

Ingrid started out dancing in Mangueira at Dançando Para Não Dançar, a program based in a dozen of Rio's favelas that provides classical ballet training to kids and teens who could otherwise not afford dance classes. It's had a great track record in training dancers that go on to train at the city's esteemed Teatro Municipal school and later, to dance in companies abroad.

She was one of the success stories of the program, and also trained at the Teatro Municipal school and with Deborah Colker's company, as well as appearing in the movie Maré, Nossa História de Amor. She danced in college and then in 2007, she got into the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH)'s summer intensive, and went to New York to train. A year later at age 19, she went back to New York to join DTH's ensemble, and later went on to join the company.

Now 25, Ingrid is disarmingly self-assured and mature. She throws around words like balance, priorities, discipline, and focus talking about her path as a dancer. She told me about how hard it was coming to New York by herself. "I had to get by on my own. That's when I grew up and learned to appreciate what my parents had taught me," she said.

When she first arrived, she didn't speak English or know anyone. She first lived with roommates, and missed the community atmosphere she'd grown up with, as well as her family. Later, she lived with a friend of her grandmother's, an older Brazilian woman, where she felt more at home. Now, she lives in her own place with her new puppy, and peppers her Portuguese with occasional English words.

I asked Ingrid about role models. While she said she looked up to Brazilian ballerinas like Ana Botafogo and Cecília Kerche, she learned that she had to inspire herself. For her, finding a role model isn't just wanting to be like a dancer. "It's how to get there," she explained. Because of that, she said she's become her own role model. She's gotten this far by herself, she says, "as a black dancer from a [low-income] community in Rio without my parents having the financial means to get me there."

Race is a huge issue in the ballet world, and not just in Brazil. At the Teatro Municipal school, Ingrid was one of four black dancers in her class of 25. And when she was younger, she wanted to join the Teatro Municipal company. But she later realized that Rio's premiere ballet company doesn't have a single black female dancer, and only a handful of black male dancers. For black female dancers in Brazil, she said, you have to go abroad to have a shot at ballet.

In the United States, the situation isn't great, but there are opportunities like the DTH, along with a few black dancers appearing in some of the country's top companies. Ingrid explained that racism in ballet is a shame, because in reality, "it's for everyone."

Ingrid dancing at New York's Greene Space in 2013

Still, she insists that her success has nothing to do with her race or background. "I'm not here because I'm poor," she said. "I'm here because of my dancing." She recalls always being one of the best in her class growing up, and worked hard at her art with the hopes of being treated equally.

Ingrid would like to go back to Brazil someday, though she doesn't know how many dance opportunities she'd have there. Plus, she points out, ballet doesn't get much recognition there. For now, Ingrid wants to focus on her dance career and later on wants to study psychology and become a dance psychologist.

These days, Ingrid is on the road much of the time with the company. She travels so much she lost track of how many times she's traveled this year. She estimates the company has around 50 to 60 trips annually to perform around the United States and throughout the world. But she can feel an extra element of home at work. Out of 18 dancers in the company, three are from Brazil, including Ingrid.

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Dance Theater of Harlem is performing at Lincoln Center in New York from April 23 to 27. Get tickets here. Ingrid will be dancing in Gloria, Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, and Contested Space.